As Canadian Olympic Machine Roars, Are We Changed?

Heart-warming stories, and not always in victory, are a Canadian tradition

One thing’s for sure - the view is better from here.

Well, if not necessarily better, wider. More comprehensive.

After being part of The Star’s Winter Olympic coverage in Nagano, Salt Lake City, Turin and Vancouver, I’m sitting this one out while Rosie DiManno, Kerry Gillespie, Dave Feschuk and Cathal Kelly give you the up-close-and-personals from Sochi.

And they’ve delivered outstanding stuff so far.

Being back here, meanwhile, is a reminder that watching the Olympics is incredibly different from being at the Olympics.

When you’re there, you see only a small slice of the action, your slice. You get a sense of life in that country, a taste of the people, the cuisine, the culture.

Back here, you really taste nothing. But you see it all. The big picture. The macro view.

In 2014, for Canada, the view is breathtaking.

Once, we were the little country that could on this stage, hoping to scratch out a few medals here. In 1988 in Calgary, we won five medals, none of them gold. Things began to change at the ‘94 Games in Lillehammer where we hit double digits for the first time.

In Vancouver, the medal count was 26, including 14 gold. An enormous haul.

And we’re getting more ambitious. Greedier.

Suddenly, Canadians aren’t just looking at the individual stories. Over the years, sometimes the losing stories have been as heartbreaking and touching as the winning ones.

We’re looking at the big board. The country-by-country score. And for the first time we’re seeing ourselves on top, at least for now.

Strange, weird and beautiful.

We’re not just plucky and friendly any more.

This is the Canadian winter sports machine at work.

Will that change us? Change how we feel about the Olympics, about how we feel about our athletes?

Will we, for example, look at favourites and see them differently now when they fail? Are we still a country that embraces personal bests? Will we sneer at some medals when we compare them to others?

When our luger Alex Gough, for instance, barely misses a medal like she did today, is that good enough?

What I hope we don’t lose, and what we certainly don’t seem to be losing, is our tendency and tradition of being able to produce moments and stories of real, gripping emotion.

We got more that today with Dara Howell and Kim Lamarre winning gold and bronze, respectively, in the women’s slopestyle ski competition. Howell was brilliant, Lamarre crashed on her first run but bounced back, while two other Canadians, Kaya Turski and Yuki Tsubota, crashed and were injured. Tsubota’s crash - she suffered a broken jaw - was awful to watch, a reminder this sport, while graceful, is dangerous.

All this, of course, came in the wake of the emotional memories of the late Sarah Burke, a pioneer in the sport who died while training. Howell cited Burke in her comments after winning, saying she did it for Burke.

Wonderful stuff, and it came on the heels of another golden embrace between Alex Bilodeau and his amazing brother Frederic and the spectacular Dufour-Lapointe sisters, two of them winners and one left off the podium, but all them together as sisters when it was over.

Even today, there was the extraordinary sportsmanship of Canadian cross-country coach Justin Wadsworth, rushing out on the course to come to the aid of Russian sprinter Anton Gaforov, who had one of his skis break. Gaforov helplessly tried to get back moving down the course, falling repeatedly, until Wadsworth jumped on the course, fixed a new ski to Gaforov’s foot, allowing the Russian to at least ski to the end of the course.

These are the stories we, as Canadians, have become used to from the Winter Olympics. Among the triumphs and the defeats, these are the moments that have warmed a nation in the heart of winter.

As we become a machine, as we pursue gold, silver and bronze like never before, we need to keep these moments coming. We have to hope they do.

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